Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Wednesday January 05, 2011 @09:30AM
from the race-to-the-bottom dept.

kdawson writes "David Gewirtz's blog post over at ZDNet warns of an imminent price collapse for traditional Mac applications, starting tomorrow when the Mac App Store opens. The larger questions: what will Mac price plunges of 90%-95% mean for the PC software market? For the Mac's market share? Quoting: 'The Mac software market is about as old-school as you get. Developers have been creating, shipping, and selling products through traditional channels and at traditional price points for decades. ... Mac software has historically been priced on a parity with other desktop software. That means small products are about $20. Utilities run in the $50-60 range. Games in the $50 range. Productivity packages and creative tools in the hundreds, and specialty software — well, the sky's the limit. Tomorrow, the sky will fall. Tomorrow, the iOS developers move in and the traditional Mac developers better stick their heads between their legs and kiss those price points goodbye.'"

These are all games and one did have a price difference between iOS and Mac, but it was a buck.

Compare that with Mac games listed on Amazon today. $38.99 $19.99 $27.54 $29.35 $54.99 $24.38. These are traditional PC prices.

As of tomorrow, games priced at $20-60 will be competing against games priced at 99 cents to $4.99. The most expensive iOS games are around ten bucks. In effect, game pricing will drop by 90-95% -- on average -- overnight.

Question: Why didn't you list out those titles that you found at $20-$55 like you did with the iPhone titles? Oh, I know, it's because they're so far from similar it would be embarrassing to reveal that the heart of your argument is on shaky ground at best.

I don't own a Mac. I don't own an iPhone. But I've seen people play games on both. From your suggestion of Amazon's bestselling Mac game titles [amazon.com] let's look at the top page without duplicates: The Sims 3, Bejeweled 3, World of Warcraft, Civilization V, Nancy Drew, and Spore. With the exception of Bejeweled (and the other Pop Cap titles), I think you are comparing apples to oranges when you say that World of Warcraft [youtube.com] is now going to have to compete with Air Hockey [youtube.com] and that Blizzard should tuck its tail between its legs and run because the $40 price point versus $1 price point means they're going to die. And in the only applicable case (Pop Cap Games), they will be the ones moving their apps to the Mac Store. So they should be afraid of themselves?

Here's how I see it: gaming on Mac has always been sort of unsupported. It's gotten a lot better recently but not all publishers see a value to it. Now, with this Mac Store, you're going to see the same publishers sell at their price point but gaming could explode on the Mac given this opportunity to transcend iOS and target OSX as well. I don't think that the applications and games that exist in the iPhone sphere are going to do much to the revenues of desktop counterparts because they're simply beefier applications. Furthermore, if they do modify those price points to compete, I'm of the opinion that the Steam Effect will take place and instead of selling 10k copies at $20 they're going to sell 100k copies at $4. The bottom line is that this software store will do little to traditional Mac sales and instead expand the subscriptions of the mobile games a bit.

Your friends are also going to have to figure out how the input on a mac with a single mouse is going to handle those times when they were sensing two or more touch points on the device screen. So even if you're right, Armageddon is not tomorrow.

Apple wins. Many of their very loyal developers will lose.

The Rapture is upon us, repent now before it is too late. Steve Jobs is a ruthless and uncaring god! Seriously man, you're blowing this up into something it's not.

At the end of the day there is still a competition. I've bought way more $5-$15 WiiShop games than I have bought $60 titles that required I buy a physical disk. You are right, it's kind of odd to compare the two, as they are about as different as different gets. However, I have quite a few games for my Wii that only cost $10 that are about 100 times better than a lot of the stuff they used to for $30 or $20 in the bargain bin at Walmart. What it really means is that developers won't be able to charge a p

At the end of the day there is still a competition. I've bought way more $5-$15 WiiShop games than I have bought $60 titles that required I buy a physical disk. You are right, it's kind of odd to compare the two, as they are about as different as different gets. However, I have quite a few games for my Wii that only cost $10 that are about 100 times better than a lot of the stuff they used to for $30 or $20 in the bargain bin at Walmart. What it really means is that developers won't be able to charge a prem

People buying sub $5 games on the iOS app store are NOT going to suddenly buy $5 games on the app store instead of proper computer-oriented titles at a higher price. Games/apps are cheap on the app store for 3 reasons: 1 - they're simple (and thus less complex to develop); 2 - the market is HUGE, there are over 100 million iOS devices out there; and 3 - the distribution and promotion is all handled through the app store.

When full computer-based titles come to the app store, prices will drop due to the ease of distribution, but the complexity/development costs will not.

You'll see a vast range of little utility apps be publicly available for cheap (probably at the expense of FREEWARE/SHAREWARE, but full price titles will not drop more than say 20%, is my bet.

The market for full OS X software simply isn't big enough to make a killing selling full featured titles are $5 a pop.

Without going into too much depth, your counter-argument is also flawed. World of Warcraft doesn't just cost $40, it also costs a subscription per month and works off of a completely different pricing model. I'm not saying that that invalidates your argument... just that you should mention ALL of the facts.

You hit the nail on the head, and it's not just gaming that the article is wrong about - I've been using Macs for a good few years, and I can categorically say that the assertion that "small products are about $20. Utilities run in the $50-60 range" is bullshit.

Can someone with knowledge of the system confirm what these OSX App Store products will be capable of? Are we talking a similar SDK to the iOS one or could you write a full blown desktop app without any restrictions?

The Mac App store seems to have less restrictions then the iOS store as the Mac is a different platform then the iOS. The App Store is meant to be a place to easily get a hold of many Mac Apps. The Mac is a full desktop, this isn't supposed to be some nefarious scheme to change that. Demos aren't allowed, Apple recommends devs continue to use their own site to distribute them. Apps that shit all over the file system aren't allowed. It must use XCode tools and installer (WoW won't be in the store) and what not. I believe in app purchases aren't allowed (i.e. Steam is probably not allowed). It doesn't seem as if Apple is interested in making this the only place to get Mac Apps, especially with the recommendation that devs still use their own sites to distribute trials, just an easy place to get many Mac tools and apps.

>>>Why didn't you list out those titles that you found at $20-$55 like you did with the iPhone titles?

Because that wasn't his point. If you read the NEXT paragraph (which I suspect you did not), he says the titles from "traditional" developers will continue to be 30-60 dollars but they will need to compete against those 1-5 dollar games, programs, et cetera from iOS competitors. Therefore the expensive titles will be largely skipped-over by customers looking for a bargain.

The very fact that these people bought Macs indicates that they are not necessarily looking for the cheapest stuff. They are prepared to pay more for quality products. If they want a game with the depth of WoW, they aren't going to make do with a flash/iOS type game instead just because it's cheaper.

If this were Microsoft, or Google, or just about any other company in the world, nobody would be making claims that $SERVICE_LAUNCH is going to change the economics of the entire software industry. It's because it's Apple, and these days people seem to work from the paradigm that Apple is the epicentre of technology - whether we're talking about devices, software, or services.

Is there something about writing about videogames that makes logic fall out of people's heads? Seems like every month I see an article on the theme of "Oh god, cheap/crappy/casual/wii/motion controlled/sex video games are going to be THE ONLY VIDEO GAMES YOU'LL BE ABLE TO BUY AND IT WILL DESTROY GAMING!!!!" At least this one had an actual mechanism for how that would happen. Typically it's just along the lines of "Since the Wii came out, motion controlled games have increased 30000%. These trends WILL C

Comparing some $2 iPhone/iPad game and a full-blown Mac game like The Sims 3 or World or Warcraft, as if there is parity just because they're both "games," is fucking retarded. These are "apps" not "applications."

Some young hotshit programmer designing a great little mini-game isn't going to drive down the price of Call of Duty 4, for Christ's sake.

Some start-up's simple photo editor isn't going to drive down the price of Photoshop (anymore than GIMP or any of a hundred other free photo editors did on the PC).

Serious development still costs money. And the more complex your application, the more you generally have to charge for it. What sells on the iPhone/iPad for a few bucks will probably sell for a few bucks on the Mac too. But no one is going to look at these little apps as replacements for more serious software (the kind that costs $20+). Apple isn't going to look at some iVideoEdit app and say "Well, we'd better lower the price of Final Cut Pro down to $5."

Photoshop is targeted quite squarely at the professional, and therefore it really isn't an 'apt' example as you say. I imagine there are many of people out there who use a pirated version at home. I also imagine adobe doesn't lose too much sleep over them. If photoshop was uncrackable, how many of those users would buy a legit license? None of them! They'd all resort to buying adobe elements, using the software bundled with their digital cameras, or resort to free alternatives such as paint.NET or gimp.

Photoshop with it's £550 price tag is a professional product, aimed at the professional user - a user whom it's assumed will be audited at the end of the year, and therefore can't avoid paying for the product. The app-store will do nothing to change that, and certainly will not harm photoshop sales in the slightest....

the professional user - a user whom it's assumed will be audited at the end of the year, and therefore can't avoid paying for the product

I've known a few freelancers who didn't buy the full product for fear of an audit - they bought the full product because they didn't want to feel like a smalltime crook every time they turned on their workstation to do some design work for a client. It's a state of mind thing: if my skills and professionalism are solid enough to land me a 5-figure design gig, I'm going to do that work using professional equipment, none of which is stolen.

the professional user - a user whom it's assumed will be audited at the end of the year, and therefore can't avoid paying for the product

I've known a few freelancers who didn't buy the full product for fear of an audit - they bought the full product because they didn't want to feel like a smalltime crook every time they turned on their workstation to do some design work for a client. It's a state of mind thing: if my skills and professionalism are solid enough to land me a 5-figure design gig, I'm going to do that work using professional equipment, none of which is stolen.

EXACTLY. The professional who uses Photoshop as part of his/her workflow is creating intellectual property that is ultimately no different from Photoshop itself. "well, I used a cracked version of Photoshop to create the design that I want to sell" would just make that person a hypocrite.

Not that hypocrites don't exist -- just look at all of the record producers who on one hand complain about pirating and illegal downloads, but on the other hand they use cracked versions of DAW software and plug-ins to make

I also think that pros know on an almost instinctual level that if they don't buy the software that they rely on, it won't be there for them in the future, at least in terms of support and critical improvements. And even if the app that I bought is bug-free and needs no training or support to operate, perhaps I want to know that they are there to add features later on, or at the very least, they will continue to target my profession with tools that make my life easier.

I think that's a component of the feeling of "rightness" that you get when you see the box on your shelf or have the serial number for the legit copy stored away somewhere.

The problem with photoshop is that its seen as "the thing to have", and is therefore used (usually pirated) by many people who simply have no need for its features and could do what they need with many of the alternatives, most of which are free or very cheap.

I know someone who use photoshop for resizing and cropping pictures, yes literally just resizing pictures, nothing fancy whatsoever... He won't even consider using any of the many free programs that would do the job, and his reason was "they're not pro

Indeed. Go look at Steam where PC games at price points between $3 and $70 happily co-exist. Even the cheapest "serious" titles are $15-$20 and I expect the same to happen here. Yes, there are small indie games sold at cheap price points and you get what you pay for.

The only situation where I could see a case for change is with small utilities - PC/Mac utility software is usually sold at between $10-$50 with $20 being often quoted. This may erode for smaller utilities but again, I expect the price to reflec

There is an enormous difference between costs of digital distribution and costs of traditional distribution. With traditional distribution, you have printing costs (e.g. manual), media costs, box art costs, print marketing, physical shipping costs, reclaims costs (damaged media), and pay a cut of profits to the developer, publisher, and point-of-sale. Worst of all is dealing with availability issues where a publisher's goal is to have zero items in a warehouse

Not on your MacBook on the bus/train/carpool unless you pay $60/mo for mobile broadband. Locally installed applications are more often designed to work offline. Does Adobe Flash Player even support anything like HTML5's CACHE MANIFEST [whatwg.org]?

The real question is how do people manage to charge $0.99 for an iPhone game when they are much closer to the free flash games available on the web or even the free games available on the iPhone.

1. Because not every iOS game is also available as a Flash game, not even remotely so2. Because Flash games are usually made for kb + mouse control, which you don't have on an iPhone3. Because the iPhone doesn't support Flash anyway4. Because even if the iPhone did support Flash, the gaming experience and battery life playing Flash games on it would be terrible. Android has Flash but I don't think many people use it for gaming.5. Because $0.99 is actually dirt cheap???

You could say the same about buying a hotdog, a carton of milk, or going to a movie theatre. Why pay for that if you can also find someones leftovers in the trash can, you can also drink water from the tap, or you can also watch regular TV at home?

As a spare-time iOS developer I always get a little sad reading stuff like this. We've come to the point where you can pick up nice games for the ridiculously low price of $0.99, games that took hundreds of hours of development, games that are often a lot better in every way and contain a lot more content than games you used to pay $20 or more (remember NeoGeo? $250 for a some games!) for 10 years ago, and yet, people all still complaining. Now it should all be free... People really have become cheap-ass bastards...:-S

Some start-up's simple photo editor isn't going to drive down the price of Photoshop (anymore than GIMP or any of a hundred other free photo editors did on the PC).

Without NeoPaint, Paint Shop Pro, GIMP, and other second-string image editors, Adobe likely wouldn't have made Photoshop Elements. Likewise, startups trying to compete with Final Cut Pro (to take your example) may encourage Apple to add features to iMovie.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Without massive piracy of Adobe's extremely expensive professional software, Adobe likely wouldn't have made Photoshop Elements. They were competing with free copies of their own stuff, not with 'second string image editors.'

But that was not accomplished by taking players from the existing AAA games, but by reaching to non-gamers, effectively expanding the games market.The average "social player" is a 43-year-old woman, which is a completely different person from the teenager/young-adult male that plays WoW or buys CoD4.

The "small developers" are not eating into the established developers' market share, they're making their own market.

Why not? In fact I won't be surprised to see WOW and/or MS Office themselves available on the Mac App Store. Why not? If it's like the iOS App Store, or Fairplay Songs, it'll have reasonably good DRM, and wide distribution at a 30% markup. Compared with the retail channel, that means the developers will take much more of the retail price. Are you aware just how little of the retail price a developer normally gets?

In fact I won't be surprised to see WOW and/or MS Office themselves available on the Mac App Store. Why not?

As I understand it, Apple requires [scribd.com] that applications in the Mac App Store MUST NOT "require license keys or implement their own copy protection" or "present a license screen at launch". Furthermore, Apple rejects applications "containing 'rental' content or services that expire after a limited time". This appears to rule out any application designed solely to connect to a proprietary network, such as a Netflix player or any MMORPG client.

Try http://download.cnet.com/mac/ [cnet.com]
Set to Purchase and have a look at the shareware.
All the $10-$40 options to do or save in, convert or work out ect some ~ small Mac task thats standalone or feeds into a larger set of tools.
Thats the fear. WoW or MsOffice are safe for now on the Mac.
12,000 downloads for a $10 app that might exist on ios for a few $.
The Mac software cartel is over. Its time for the $99 basement code app that phones home a bit too much:)

In the GCC 2.8 days, the "developers' attitude and resistance" led to an experimental fork called EGCS, which eventually became GCC 3. Should Mac OS X and Mac hardware become locked down as tightly as iOS and iPod touch hardware, I imagine that a coalition of ex-Mac developers might fork GNUstep in a similar manner to allow migration from Cocoa.

Considering Apple has explicitly stated that they have zero plans to force people to use the app store, perhaps the better question would be why you consider it even remotely likely that they will?

You're right, Apple doesn't have a good track record of providing "open" products, but Apple also doesn't have a track record of *ratcheting down restrictions on what you can do with your device after you've purchased it.*

Please cite examples of where Apple has "taken away" the ability to do something with a produ

Keep in mind that Apple is a company that dictated what programming languages developers could use to develop software for one of its platforms. Do you realize how absurd that is? Do you realize how absolutely wrong it is?

No, in fact I don't realize that, maybe you can elaborate? How is this different from about *every freaking other* integrated consumer electronics product on the market? Can I program Java on WP7? Can I program C# on Android? Can I program Java on the Nintendo DS? Can I program Visual Basic on Blackberry?

Here's the thing: Apple created an operating system, a buttload of frameworks, devices that run them, and a set of development tools, the latter of which you can even get for free. All of this was designed and implemented with a number of technologies in mind that fit the hardware and the platform. In terms of programming languages that's Objective-C, C, C++, Fortran. In terms of application and UI frameworks that's Cocoa, UIKit, etc. In terms of development tools (including packaging, provisioning, code signing, and submission to the application store) that's XCode. It's actually all pretty complex, and probably took a lot of time and millions of investment to get everything together. Because Apple provides both the hardware and the retail channel for applications running on the hardware, it is very important for them that applications use the features the platform offers as much as possible, because a crap user experience will hurt the perception of their own products. Which is why they spent a lot of time on the SDK and the development toolchain. Ask any iOS developer and they will tell you that they did in fact do a pretty good job.

Now how absurd and wrong is it that they don't allow every idiot who knows some random programming language to distribute their stuff via the iOS app store? If you want to program Haskell on your iPhone, go ahead, nobody is stopping you, but don't expect Apple to put your work in the app store, just like Microsoft will not allow you to publish a GW-BASIC program on the Xbox 360, or Sony will allow you to distribute a Java application through PSN. Other companies also provide SDKs that you have to use to publish on their platforms, there's nothing absurd or wrong about that. Stop seeing a phone platform as some kind of hobbyist playground that should allow you to do everything with it you desire.

When was the last time you complained you can't reprogram the scaler in your HDTV, or write a Java program for your car ECU?

What precisely do you mean by open systems in this context? If you mean ability to install/run any executable you want, they have a track record of more than 25 years of that on Mac systems. That's certainly a good track record.

They don't allow it on phones because malware is a far bigger threat on phones than on PCs.

Now think! If Apple created a version of OSX where you could no longer install software that wasn't available from the App Store, then most of their customers would not upgrade to it, because their existing off the shelf apps would no longer be installable. It'd have an adoption rate even lower than Vista. So why the fuck would Apple do it?

What a terrible article. Does he interview any actual developers? Does he talk to software resellers? Does he talk to iPhone developers considering the move to the app store? Does he have any statistics at all? No, he did his research by looking at Amazon and MacConnection. He came up with a whole bunch of scary sounding analogies, though - I guess that should drive traffic to his site.

I think that, in the short term, the App store is going to compete with the traditional shareware market, which has always been pretty active in the Macintosh community. The solution for those developers is simple: make their products available on the app store. It will probably help them in the long run.

I've noticed something wonderful about the whole "app" phenomenon, something I haven't seen in a decade of working in IT.

Lightweight apps. Apps that get right to the point, and don't require lots of time to install and configure. After spending an hour installing Adobe's Master Collection and another half hour patching it, I say the desktop app revolution can't come soon enough.

Yes, I realize that "fat apps" will not be replaced anytime soon by "thin apps", but it could force people to really decide if the fat app is worth the headache and expense.

Finally, I understand the financial needs of developers - but the app store should allow devs to get more eyeballs on their product, and make distribution of their product easier. Sure the margins may be smaller, but the volume will probably make up for it.

I've noticed something wonderful about the whole "app" phenomenon, something I haven't seen in a decade of working in IT.

Lightweight apps.

I couldn't agree with this more -- small, simple apps that do one thing. Do it exceedingly well, and do it quickly is a huge thing. I've got more apps installed on my iPad than I typically do on my Windows machines -- largely because they're small, and I've only been downloading the free ones so there's no real cost to test drive something to see if it might be fun/usef

Thing is, you have seen those apps - but they were called Shareware. Everyone was saying there was real trouble selling them. But now they're called Free and Premium Apps and suddenly they're hotcakes.

I am starting to think it's the Mall sales experience of the App Stores (plural) making a difference.

Thing is, you have seen those apps - but they were called Shareware. Everyone was saying there was real trouble selling them. But now they're called Free and Premium Apps and suddenly they're hotcakes.

I am starting to think it's the Mall sales experience of the App Stores (plural) making a difference.

The trouble with Shareware is and was the fact that as a developer you can't get the word out, you have to set up your own licensing and money handling infrastructure (or to trust your users...), users aren't that willing to hand money over to some unknown guy... in the end you just don't make much money.

Having Apple handle the distribution, licensing and money handling and getting in a big store can help to make money while offering your software for cheap. The whole iPhone/iPad App Store has proven that s

Compare something like the official AIM or Yahoo clients vs Pidgin or Adium...The latter gets straight to the point, and provides useful functions like being able to connect to multiple networks from a single client... The former clients are usually plastered with ads, and tend to be much bigger than the third party clients.

The only thing Apple brings to the table, is recognition for some of the smaller lightweight apps.

The author must have worked very hard to avoid examining the history of steam and impulse on the PC, where a wide range of prices happily coexist.Either that or hes one of those "I've never used a PC" people.

I wonder if this might not balance out somewhat -- before you had to make physical boxed copies, and put it into as many stores as possible. People had to go out looking for it (or order it) and all that.

The App Store seems to provide you with a larger possible base, lower distribution costs as you don't need to make the physical boxes, and a ready distribution model.

Not saying this will help all software, but the App Store seems to give you a better chance at Economies of Scale than before. Hell, I see s

Although I have no experience with Mac development, how can you possibly compare a desktop game to a game written for an iPhone? It's like comparing a game written in flash to World of Warcraft. I'm not saying the flash game isn't good, but it's not going to replace desktop gaming anytime soon. The article assumes that one game is interchangeable with another. Devs just need to keep putting out quality products at reasonable prices and they should be fine.

I can see the small utility app market having a market correction, since a lot of those are fairly overpriced on the Mac platform compared to their counterparts on other platforms, but aside from those and possibly games of the same class as a smartphone game I wouldn't expect much change. Steam's been out for years and has millions of satisfied users, yet all the titles on it have regular prices within $10 of, if not matching, retail. They tend to go on sale more often and with deeper discounts, but that

Most applications designed for smartphones(iOS, Android, WebOS, etc...) are fairly small applications that do not have a lot of complexity compared to applications designed for a computer. This means that except for the casual games you find from Popcap or Shockwave, there isn't a direct apples to apples comparison. The Sims 3 for a mobile device or even a console will tend to be a lower end or cut rate version of what is available for a normal computer.

Armageddon tired of these apocalyptic prophesies. Price is the intersection of supply and demand, nothing more, nothing less. If you think you can't sell your app unless it's at a $1 price point, then you're admitting that it offers only a trivial benefit to your users or that it's a piece of crap. Either improve it to where it's worth what you'd like to make, or drop out of the competition.

For decades the Mac has had a viable shareware scene where you download apps and, if desired, pay a modest fee to upgrade to a full or non-crippled version. I don't see how anyone could possibly argue that a Mac App Store will be the end of the world unless they're a clueless analyst who thinks the only programs people run on Macs are Photoshop and Office.

Apple's iWork suite (Pages, KeyNote and Numbers) is rumored to be [macrumors.com] coming out at $20 per application, c.f. the current version at $80 for the bundle. That's a significant price drop but hardly a collapse (and could be self-compensating if it leads to more sales) - and Apple are probably in a position to price that as a loss leader to promote the store.

Something like Plants vs. Zombies (excellent casual game) is $3 on the iPhone, $7 on the iPad vs. (currently) $20 for the mac, which is a bit more of a price drop (I think the Mac version has a few extras, but there's an awful lot in the iPad version). Note that there's already a precident for charging more for iPad versions, so there's no expectation that Mac versions will match the iOS price. PvZ for Mac has already been on offer on Steam for less, at times.

Then there's things like CoPilot and TomTom at (UK) price points like £19.99, £39.99, £59.99 for iPhone - Probably not good candidates for a Mac version, but they give the lie to the idea that everything on the iOS app store costs $0.99.
(Apologies for the currency mixing - but this is Apple so $1 and £1 aren't a lot different...)

i have to say, this will be the most interesting thing to watch and i'm dying to know the outcome. i don't think many people realize the gravity of this situation.

usually, the idea of an app store on Mac/PC's is the worst idea ever. as with digital distribution, u don't see prices automatically decline over time. example, take bf:bc 2. it's now selling for like $10. u won't see that. it'll stay at 60, maybe now it would be $40-50 (8 mo. later), and they would do a special for a week (that most likely u'll m

and the trend of the app store that if it's over $4, no one wants it (or for big apps, over $10 and no one wants it)

I think you are confusing "no one buys" with "sells less copies than Angry Birds at £0.99".

On the UK iOS store, #2 on the "top grossing" list is TomTom, at £39. The "Top 200" grossing list includes titles at £5, £7, £9, £18, £37.

There aren't that many "serious" apps on the iOS store because (a) who would want (say) a full-blown DTP suite on an iPhone and (b) the iPad, which is suitable for slightly more heavyweight apps, hasn't been around for a year yet. I'd expe

Steam is currently selling BF:BC2 for £19.99; when it was released back in May it was £39.99, so while it's going for £12.99 on Amazon & Play, it's still halved in price on Steam since its release (and it was available for under a tenner during the Christmas sales).

I guess it's a trade-off; on the one hand, you get slightly higher prices on new-ish games unless you're willing to wait for special offers (though to be fair Steam usually do pre-order discounts on new titles), but to count

Steam is currently selling BF:BC2 for £19.99; when it was released back in May it was £39.99, so while it's going for £12.99 on Amazon & Play, it's still halved in price on Steam since its release (and it was available for under a tenner during the Christmas sales).

Before someone claims this is an isolated case, every single one of Valve's games has done the same thing. The only exceptions that I can think of are the ones they originally offered in packs, where the pack [steampowered.com] has dropped in

As of tomorrow, games priced at $20-60 will be competing against games priced at 99 cents to $4.99. The most expensive iOS games are around ten bucks. In effect, game pricing will drop by 90-95% — on average — overnight.

Has the plethora of free software available already for the mac ruined the market for paid for utilities and professional apps? Has Steam, which is probably the closest thing to the app store you can get for PC games and where you can get plenty of indie games for a couple of dollars each, ruined the game market for big professional developers?

In my economics class I learned that the lack of consumer information keeps prices higher then they would in a perfectly competitive marketplace. These apps stores greatly improve consumer information allowing them to easily compare all available products and are nearly a perfectly competitive marketplace.

Another thing I learn is that in a perfectly competitive marketplace profit approaches 0.

The summary is overlooking Adobe completely. I see no reason to expect that they are going to drop their sotware prices by 90% tomorrow. Being as they are the most important software company for the Mac today, that is a huge player who won't be in the game. They go out of their way to prevent piracy, they certainly aren't about to start distributing their top titles as downloadable applications for $5 a pop.

Goddamn! Every time I hear someone utter "price point" I want to stab them in the face. Just say "price."

The Wikipedia article about price points [wikipedia.org] states that "price point" refers to the sharp change in quantity demanded at specific prices. These changes appear as "points" on the demand curve.

True, but it seems to me that it's overused, as I often read 'price point' when the distinction isn't relevant. I always suspect the author of just wanting to sound fancier without knowing what the difference is.

What similarly drives me nuts is the use of 'mark,' as in "At the <bla> <dollar/second/mile> mark." Mostly just sentence stuffing; the opposite of good writing. Certainly the opposite of pleasant reading.

Price points are not the same as prices. Prices are every numerical price from 0.01c to the most expensive thing you can imagine. Price points are attractive numbers that products tend to retail at. 95c, 99c, $1.95, $1.99, $2.95, $2.99 etc.

How many of you have spent some time on Pirate Bay seeking torrents for CS5 because whilst you're honest, there is no way you can afford $$$$.$$ for your tools?

And how many of you who have gone out of your way to download CS5 really need it? I'm betting most people who think they "need" this are just downloading it because they want it -- you could probably use Inkscape or GIMP for most everything you do. If you're a business, buy the damned thing and write it off on your taxes... if you're playing with

Adobe knows damn well that something like 85% of their users are pirates. But the 15% that aren't are mostly corporate users who are part of volume license agreements and therefore won't be using the app store anyway.
It works out well for Adobe: amateurs pirate the software, learn to use the app well enough to produce professional work, and end up paying retail when they start making money from it. The piracy essentially locks any significant competition out of the marketplace.

If anything they'd be cheaper if sold in a less restricted market place.

So, where is that marketplace? The flea market? If you go to a Bricks-and-Mortar establishment, or to Amazon they will promote some goods over others and refuse to carry some goods. The app store permits competition and that's why it's been a race to the bottom of the profit margin barrel. The only thing between you and the app you want is the rafts of crap.

Watch this carefully...if it works and is a game changer MS may well be forced into following suit and providing a forum for competition against their own very high cost products.

You are aware that Microsoft already has the infrastructure [gamesforwindows.com] in place to do this?

Besides which, if MS had such a store on the PC that was bundled with the OS, they would still have control over what goes into said store, just like they do on the Games for Windows Live and Xbox Live marketplaces.

That raises a slightly more interesting point. Maybe instead of driving down the price of traditional desktop apps, the app store will drive up prices overall, because you submit that app you developed in your spare time and were giving away free on your 50 visitors a month website to the store and suddenly, through larger exposure, you're making a little pocket money from it. I wonder if more lone developers will be tempted down that path when previously they might have given their stuff away for free or r

Software is simply overpriced, vendors have been getting away with charging ridiculous amounts for years because they're greedy. Software sales are 99% profit

Horseshit. Pure horseshit.

Having worked as a professional developer for 13 years before my current job, unless you have a stable codebase which nobody is changing, you have expenses for developers, QA, documentation and tech writers, sales, marketing... plus you have to pay the accountants, lawyers, admin staff, IT staff, office costs, and executive bonuses.

There is no freaking way that software sales are 99% profit -- nowhere close. Building commercial software is an expensive, and resource intensive task. Anybody saying otherwise has likely never done it.

Just because some people can afford to/are willing to give away their labors for free (and I'm certainly a fan of free software) doesn't mean there isn't a cost associated with it. These people are either doing it because it's fun, or because they're students. In either case, they still need to pay their bills and couldn't afford to write free software if they weren't getting paid from something else (or had nothing better to do with their time).